


Shadows

by LadyNighteyes



Category: Radiant Historia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Persona Fusion, Character Study, Gen, Meta, Mirrored from Tumblr, Spoilers, Symbolic Video Game Boss Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2019-09-11 21:35:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16860706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyNighteyes/pseuds/LadyNighteyes
Summary: Crosspost of a series of posts I made a couple years back aboutPersona 4-style Shadows for some of the RH cast.





	1. Stocke

**Author's Note:**

> This series was inspired by a combination of 1) Tanaka's fic [Nornir](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4319841), and me thinking about RH/Persona fusions that _aren't_ high school AUs, 2) me nerding out over thematically clever boss mechanics in Persona 3 and 4, and 3) my deep, all-consuming love of this game. This is probably going to be the first of many  
> \--  
> Shadows 101: a Shadow represents the repressed negative emotions and feelings of the person it’s born from, everything they don’t like and don’t want to admit about themselves. In P4, the formula goes, “Shadow shows up -> party has to go through a dungeon formed around the Shadow, periodically seeing and hearing it as they go -> person whose Shadow it is confronts it -> Shadow says things to get under that person’s skin until they reject it by saying “you’re not me” -> the Shadow transforms into a big scary monster, the person passes out, and there’s a boss fight -> the person accepts the Shadow as a part of them and it turns into a Persona and they become a party member.” (The last step’s optional.) There’s a lot of ~symbolism~, especially because the Persona series associates everything with tarot cards.

If we’re sticking closely enough to P4′s formula to have dungeons, a lot of the party’s would look like battlefields. His would be one of them, but it wouldn’t look like just _one_ battle- the scenery would change at random, from place to place and time to time, forests and deserts and cities, sometimes burning and sometimes already burned out.

In human form his Shadow’s dressed a lot like him, but it’s ditched the red parts of his outfit- it just has the dark clothes and armor he wears under the jacket and cloak. All exposed metal has been darkened with soot so it won’t shine in the darkness, and he’s half-drenched in blood. It doesn’t look like it’s his. The little half-smile isn’t much wider than usual, but on someone with yellow eyes and most of one side of his face covered in blood, it looks a lot scarier.

It tells him he’s a monster who plays with people’s lives, that he does nothing but try to avoid the consequences of his actions, that he’ll do anything if he thinks he can reverse it and avoid those consequences. That he’ll kill others or let them die for his own ends while holding out some higher cause as a shield to avoid culpability. When all he does is look away and say nothing, it switches tacks- it tells the others which of them he’s killed, who he’s left stranded alone in enemy territory, that the only person in this room whose death he hasn’t caused is his own, and that wasn’t for lack of occasionally considering it (”Just another way to run away,” it says). He falls for the goading when it starts to address Marco- he knows what it’s going to say, and he knows what could happen if it does, and he slams it against a wall to try to get it to shut up. It just grins- an unsettling expression on his face- and asks if it should tell Eruca and Aht that he knows what he is.

What finally got Stocke to reject it was when it said, his sword at its throat, “Why should you care what I tell them? After all, you can lie and they’ll believe whatever bullshit you give them. They always do. I know- I’m you, after all.”

It turns into a shadowy figure- it looks humanoid, but it’s impossible to make out details in the darkness except where its hands drip red fire like blood. It’s got a dark sword in one hand, made of the same shadow as the rest of its body.

At the beginning of the fight and periodically afterward, it sinks into the blackness covering the ground and summons five lesser shadows, becoming untargetable. They are, respectively, an Emperor-arcana shadow that spams party-wide phys skills, a Priestess-arcana one that spams Mind Charged almighty skills, a Chariot that has the most powerful single-target versions of all four elemental spells and targets weaknesses, a Strength-arcana one that’s strong to pretty much everything and heals the others, and a Hanged Man that casts reflect spells to protect one of them each turn. You have to kill all of them for the real boss to come back.

For single-target attacks, it disappears into the ground before rising behind its target, and it sinks back down again after it strikes, reappearing where it came from.

The fight’s a nightmare, unsurprisingly. Its displayed resistances in the analysis screen don’t match how much damage it takes from things, and whenever it’s knocked down it uses a skill that shuffles its resistances- both the real ones and what the analysis screen displays- randomly. It always reflects instant death and resists almighty, though.

It mostly uses a barrage of physical and fire attacks, with a rather nasty corollary- any time one of its damage-dealing attacks fails to do damage, it immediately blasts the party with heavy unavoidable almighty damage. Sometimes it tosses out a pair of full-party instant death spells as well, but those at least you won’t get nuked for being immune to or dodging.

If the party survives and he accepts it, well… he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do.


	2. Eruca

Her dungeon is a castle, but everything is enormously oversized, with carpets the depth of tall grass and mouseholes for doors.

Her Shadow is a child in clothes too large for her and a crown too big for her head, alternating between crying and calling out for her brother and speaking in an imperious tone and ordering him to stay away. (Sometimes she says “Ernst,” sometimes she says “brother.” Never any other name.) Once, towards the end of the dungeon, an order to keep his distance is followed by a switch back to tearful as she says, “So I can’t hurt you again.”

Eruca thinks she knows what to expect. She’s wrong.

It’s _angry_.

It says that the people around her don’t see her for herself or take her seriously in her own right, and that to them she’s just a replacement for her brother. That they wouldn’t care about her if not for him, that they wouldn’t support her if he was there instead. It’s angry at her father for killing him, and him for dying, and at Stocke for reappearing. She can’t get out of her brother’s shadow whatever she does, and at the same time she wants him back so he can help her. “I hate him,” it says- he wasn’t what she needed him to be when it really mattered, and he abandoned her to something she wasn’t prepared for and the constant judgement of everyone who knew him.

Of course Eruca can’t accept that- she loves her brother.

As I’ve said before, I’d probably do something similar to [this fan-Shadow for Mitsuru from P3](http://personashadows.tumblr.com/post/90025903487/shadow-mitsuru-trapped-in-a-position-she-never) for Eruca- frozen to a throne of ice. There’s a masked figure in the ice below her, a chain running from one of its wrists to hers. Her other arm is free, and sometimes she reaches down towards the figure.

It uses a lot of ice spells, of course, plus almighty and phys. Certain attacks, though, have odd targeting- it has a couple party-wide attacks which inflict debuffs which always seem to miss Stocke, but it will occasionally use a skill which makes it immune to damage for a brief period and target him with a HP/SP drain attack.

She doesn’t look at him, afterward. For her sake, he pretends he doesn’t notice.


	3. Heiss

Heiss’s Shadow looks fairly monstrous even before it transforms. It’s ancient, wizened and skeletal, its eyes sunken. It barely looks alive; there are fairy tales about quests to kill things that look like this, their hearts locked up in hidden jars. It calls Heiss by a name he left behind years ago.

The dungeon looks like the Royal Hall, but threads of purple-black power run through it and the stonework is even more crumbling than the real thing. The crystals are cracked and splintered, shards crunching underfoot, and sparks dance in the air.

It tells him that he killed Ernst far more thoroughly than Victor ever could have, that he’s done what he has to Stocke more out of ego than concern. That it’s all about projection- he looks at his nephew and sees himself, and not what’s really there. And it tells him, too, that his grand justifications are nothing but a flimsy disguise for cowardice and selfishness- he doesn’t care if the world deserves to live or not, just so long as _he_ doesn’t have to die. It tells him he wants Stocke as his mirror so he can shore up his excuses, that all he wants from him is validation- after all, for what possible reason could he _need_ a successor, when all it would take to achieve his stated goal would be to wait? It tells him that everything he has he takes from others, and he can’t survive without it- not just the mana and souls he steals, but the network of pawns that lets him shape the world, their wills subsumed to his own. And his nephew.

“Admit it,” it says. “He doesn’t care about you, and you don’t care about him. You just want someone to tell you that you’re right, and you’ve deluded yourself into thinking he will.” If Heiss gets his way, it says, in the end, there will only be one person left for him to feed on- no one for him to play games with to get off on a power high, no one for him to make little jokes to himself about his plans for, no one to feel _superior_ to. Just Heiss and his mirror, and sooner or later Stocke will stop being what Heiss wants him to be and Heiss will eat him alive.

Heiss can’t _not_ reject it- what does this thing know about him, anyway?

Its form is that of a puppeteer, the body of a person rising out of ground and looking down at the featureless wooden puppet suspended in a web of cords between its hands. Cables of power feed into the main body from somewhere, trailing off into nothingness- they look rather like life support tubes. When the Shadow attacks, it lets go of the puppet with one hand, leaving one of the puppet’s arms dangling uselessly and its head lolling to one side until the Shadow picks up the strings again.

The Shadow summons a more-or-less constant stream of identical minions, and it regularly kills them to regain health. It uses more or less every status effect in the game, including the Fear/Ghastly Wail instant death combo, and its minions keep up the status-boost field effect Stagnant Air pretty much indefinitely. There’s a pretty good chance that at any given time, at least one member of your party will be out of your control when your turn starts, and the Shadow has a signature move that drains health and MP from anyone with a status effect.

It’s probably better for everyone if Heiss doesn’t accept it afterwards- no one wants to fight Apocrypha immediately after.


	4. Raynie

Raynie’s dungeon is an arena, sand floors hemmed in by walls with empty seats rising above them in rows. The desert sun bakes down from overhead, but it never moves. Her Shadow wears rags and scraps of ill-fitting leather armor, an outfit assembled out of desperate practicality and with no money to spare, and carries a plain spear. Its room in the center is the only one with people in the stands- a few faceless, scattered figures, watching but distant and uncaring.

She’s a slave, it says, of her own volition. She calls it loyalty when it’s really laziness, a wish for someone else to make her decisions for her. She gives up her freedom and agency so she doesn’t have to think, lets others and their orders run her life. She puts her life on the line for people to whom she’s nothing more than a tool just so she won’t have to work things out for herself. She can’t choose anything on her own, it says- cut her off from one boss, and she’ll drift until she finds another, and go back to doing whatever she’s ordered to. Even Marco, it says- as long as he’s around she doesn’t have to learn.

The last part was too much.

Transformed, it’s an attack dog- it looks like some sort of mutt, a mix of bull terrier and shepherd and who knows what- on a chain held by an indistinct figure. Its collar is spiked and its ears are tattered, and it growls and snarls at the party. The figure behind it doesn’t move much; there’s no reaction from it when the Shadow is hurt or knocked down, but it does point when the Shadow attacks.

It tends to focus on one target at a time, hammering them as hard as it can for several turns before moving on to another. It uses a party-wide phys attack before switching targets, but otherwise, its only multi-target attacks are ones hitting a weakness of its current target. It cancels out attack debuffs on itself, but doesn’t seem to notice any other kind.

Even when the Shadow is defeated, the figure behind it barely moves, standing still and unconcerned as both dissolve into a cloud of dark sparks.


	5. Marco

Marco’s Shadow is a creature of resentment and rage. It insults and derides the others- Raynie is stupid, Aht is irritating, Eruca is soppily idealistic and ineffective, and Rosch can’t be bothered to think. It reserves particular vitriol for Stocke, accusing him of thinking he’s better than everyone else, arrogantly holding himself apart.

It says it’s sick of being taken for granted, of being ignored, given orders with the expectation of unquestioning obedience. He does what he’s told and he’s rarely asked what he thinks and nobody ever stops to worry about him or listens to what he has to say. He asks for nothing, gets less, and nobody seems to notice. Does anyone who calls themself his friend even see him as anything but their helper? Everyone wants something from him, and expects him to give it to them, but no one ever does anything _for_ him.

Marco doesn’t hate them. He _doesn’t_. He came here to help Raynie of his own free will, because he cares about her, and he’d never say the things the creature with his face is saying-

It’s huge and tall and angry and wears a field nurse’s uniform, holding a smiling mask over its face with one hand and a bloody surgical knife in the other.

In combat, it summons a bunch of Basalts that absorb wind (it nulls it), casts Valiant Dance and a defense buff on its party (it nulls Berserk on itself, but it always hits the Basalts), and proceeds to spam a mixture of physical skills (it likes the ones that inflict Poison) and a spell that hits everything on both sides for wind damage. If the Basalts are killed, it summons more.

The others tread lighter around him afterward.


	6. Aht

Aht is young to have as solid a Shadow as she does. It looks older than her, in fact, a young woman dressed to formally officiate a funeral. Her dungeon is a graveyard, bright and blooming with flowers, and the deeper you go the newer the graves are, and the more of them are empty.

In an adult, a Shadow like hers would probably voice selfishness and frustration, anger at death and a desire to defy the order of the world, bending it to her will and damn the consequences. But Aht is a child and embraces that selfishness, and so her Shadow is the reverse: the voice of guilt, doubt, and despair.

Death happens, it says. What right has she to hope to defy it? How dare she wish for a stay of execution on the doomed, when she knows and has seen the consequences? How arrogant she is, how hypocritical, to show the lost souls of strangers the way and then refuse to offer the same kindness to those she cares for. To wish the dead back is to wish to hurt them, enslave them, and make the world her enemy. It’s selfish, it says, childish to try to make things other than they are, placing her desires above the needs of the world.

When Aht denies it, its form isn’t too monstrous, as Shadows go- a figure with a mask of a goat skull and a robe of white and starry black.

Combat-wise, it has a set pattern: a party-wide knockdown immediately followed by a multitarget spell of a random element, and then an ability on the next turn that instantly kills anyone Dizzy’d. Midway through the fight it starts taking control of party members a la Kunino-Sagiri- anyone who’s been revived in the fight is vulnerable, and Stocke always is. As soon as one snaps out of it, it moves on to the next target until running out.

Stocke holds her as she cries, at the end, and pretends not to know his place in her grief.


End file.
